How to Master Technical SEO Audit to Improve Your Google Rankings
How often do you look into the technical aspects of your site to check what is lacking?
Before beginning the Technical SEO audit process, consider the possible reasons that can affect your site’s performance. Since the SEO audit process involves many steps, people are often confused about where to begin and which part to emphasize.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO Audits involve analyzing the key issues preventing your site from growing. It is essential to detect problem areas and incorporate strategies to make your site stand out to beat your industry peers.
Here is a complete guide to the SEO audit process. Every site must eliminate problematic areas to gain more organic traffic through search rankings.
Some Major Aspects that Affect Website’s SEO
Since the discussion concerns SEO audits, it is essential to understand why you need them. To understand that, you need to examine a few factors affecting your website and its search engine optimization process.
- Technical aspects include indexing, page load speed, and hosting.
- On-page aspects: It includes the type of content your site possesses, keywords, and other terms you use.
- Off-page aspects: Backlinking and other external links equally affect the site’s performance, and these are part of off-page SEO.
Other factors, such as mobile-friendliness, broken links, etc., can significantly prevent a site from ranking on Google. These key areas should be considered while conducting an SEO Audit.
Steps to Follow While Running a Technical SEO Audit
As the problem areas have already been discussed, let’s examine how to detect their presence.
Check if your website is crawlable.
Clicking the site and checking if all the parameters have been met while creating content is essential.
The crawling process helps identify duplicate content, broken links, excess redirects, or other site issues.
Check if Google has indexed your site.
No matter how engaging or premium-quality content you create, your site will not make a mark if the search engine does not discover it. And that is only possible when your site is indexed, which requires a simple step.
Go to Google Search Console > look for Google Index > Click on Index Status.
This process allows checking the number of pages indexed by Google. Indexing is essential for every website; without it, you cannot attain website traffic.
Go through all the Internal links.
Proper internal linking helps to attain traffic, and checking if the links are appropriate is essential. While going through, look out for broken links that often confuse visitors as they look for specific content through these links.
Also, check the orphan pages, which are not linked to your website’s pages and are problematic for search engines to find. Additionally, check the click depth, which refers to the number of clicks required to jump from a specific page to the homepage. To positively impact users, the number should be as low as possible.
Page load Speed
A significant factor is your website’s page load speed since users hardly have the patience to wait for your page to open. This automatically affects your bounce rate and your site’s performance. You can check via Google PageSpeed Insights. The following result shows the result.
While conducting a technical SEO audit, this part should be given equal priority as this flaw can be a significant obstacle to attaining organic traffic.
A Backlink Audit is a must.
Many website owners do not focus on this aspect and fail to understand why their site is not achieving sufficient traffic. Backlinks play a significant role in sending bulk traffic to a particular site; crawlers also pay attention to this aspect.
To ensure the search engine finds your site authentic, you must be careful with the backlinks you generate. These should be relevant to the other site from which you create the backlink.
Look out for Duplicate or thin Content.
The Webmaster Guidelines mention that Google despises duplicate or even auto-generated content. To attract organic visitors to your site, you must include content that adds value.
While running an SEO audit, you can use specific tools to check for duplicate content. If the content is thin, you must manually check it to add further details that can make it up to par. You can also get help from renowned content writing services in India that provide premium-quality content that keeps your target audience hooked.
Conducting a Technical SEO Audit requires a lot of time. In addition to these steps, one must look out for multiple data errors and irrelevant keywords that can be equally harmful to your site. Also, ensure your site is secure and contains ‘HTTPS’, as this also eliminates the chances of getting a higher rank in search engines.
Furthermore, factors like page titles, title tags, and meta descriptions help enhance the quality of your site and bring the maximum amount of traffic. Therefore, it is advisable to check these parameters to improve your rankings.
